Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus 231 booK rEVIEWS/ComPTES

Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus 231
Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus
Anctil, Pierre. Jacob-Isaac Segal (1896-1854); un poète yiddish
de Montréal et son mileu
Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2012. 447 pp.
The poet J.I Segal was widely known and revered in the
Montreal Jewish cultural community. So why is it that so
few people are familiar with the content of a single one of his
poems? Yud Yud Segal, as he was known by some, is at once
remembered and forgotten.
Pierre Anctil addresses this lacuna with a beautifully
written and researched book abounding in grace, nuance and
depth, Jacob-Isaac Segal: un poète yiddish de Montréal et son
milieu. The volume is a biography, a memoir of a literary friendship between the poet and the celebrated community organizer
and literary critic, Hannaniah Meir Caiserman, and a collective
portrait of Yiddish Montreal.
Segal was a shy and retiring man who left very little
biographical material. In spite of this, he emerges as a complex
person: a community based teacher (he taught at the Jewish
People’s School) who was essentially reclusive and introspective, a modernist whose later work stands out for its use of
traditional religious symbolism, a man drawn to New York but
at home in Montreal, a poet who teetered spiritually between the
shtetl and the city, the Old and the New World. He was born in
1896 and raised in the Ukrainian shtetl of Koretz in the household of his maternal grandfather, a harsh and austere Hasidic
merchant who refused to support the family of his widowed
daughter. Koretz was clearly a place of alienation and pain, yet
the shtetl is often invoked in his work as an ideal world, pristine,
pure and whole. (120-125)
Canadian Jewish Studies, Volume 20, 2012 / Études juives canadiennes,
tome 20, 2012
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Segal immigrated to Montreal at the age of 15 with his
mother and sister. Except for a stay in New York between 1923
and 1928, he lived in the city until his sudden death in 1954. He
began his working life as a clothing factory worker, though after
a few years he was able to eke out a meager subsistence through
writing and teaching. Economically marginal all his life, Segal
still managed to churn out hundreds of literary reviews, news
commentaries, and poems.
Anctil`s biography follows the contours of Segal`s literary life. He documents Segal’s early literary successes as a new
immigrant in the 1920s in Montreal and his failed adventure of
establishing himself as a poet amongst the modernist “Di Yunge”
group in New York, where he experienced the sudden loss of a
beloved daughter. It follows him back to Montreal and through
the lean years of the depression, when a loving and nurturing
Yiddish community, including the salon hostess Ida Maza and
the irrepressible friend and patron H.M. Caiserman, supported
his literary efforts. The author’s treatment of the holocaust
and its aftermath, where the devastated Segal turns inwards to
mysticism and traditional imagery in an effort to recapture the
vanished world of his youth, is poignant and immediate. Anctil
captures, in a very intimate and personal way, the moment of
loss of connection of an entire community.
The entire narrative is interwoven with the biography
of Hannaniah Meir Caiserman (1884-1950), who was born in
Rumania and who arrived in Montreal in 1910. Caiserman,
who had spoken very little Yiddish in Europe, was possessed
with a burning faith in the power of the language as a vehicle
for the national, cultural, and socialist aspirations of the Jewish
people. Involved in a myriad of political and cultural initiatives
largely under the auspices of the Poale Tzion, he was the driving
force behind the formation of organizations such as the Jewish
Canadian Congress and the Refugee Relief Committee. He was
also the author of the invaluable Yiddishe Dikhter in Kanade, an
annotated catalogue of Jewish Canadian writers still used as a
reference by students of Canadian Yiddish literature.
Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus 233
The two men were bound together by the shared values
of idealism, universalism, loyalty to Judaism and artistic innovation, as well as by mutual admiration and affection. Segal
supplied much of the material that became the subject for
Caiserman’s literary criticism. Montreal’s foremost klal tuer
paid, on occasion, to have Segal’s work published. He organized fund-raising events for the same purpose, and opened
his home to Segal and to other Jewish artists. In fact most
of the biographical information we have about Segal’s background and childhood comes from the biographical sketches
that Caiserman wrote, based on his interviews with Segal.1 The
friendship between the two men (who died within four years of
each other) forms a leitmotiv of the book, accompanied by a
paean to the city that nurtured their relationship.
According to Anctil Segal was the first poet in Quebec
to embrace modern urbanity in his work. Consequently, he
chooses to focus on Segal`s Montréalité, both the lens through
which the poet’s modernity is reflected and the repository of
longing for the idealized innocence of the shtetl, as we see in
the following excerpts.
Dans mon labyrinthe
De désires et de péchés étincelants où retentissent et brillent des milliers de signes,
Je ferais jaillir les sources
De mes joies insondables
Et exploser milles feux de lumières!
Vous quitterez vos champs infinis
Pour rejoindre mon royaume de pierres
Abandonnant le calme divin
Des forêts et des rivières2
In this instance the language is secular and universalistic.
However, Segal also “appropriates” Montreal by Yiddishizing it.
…ce jour de Dimanche rayonnent encore davantage les croix dorées
De grosses cloches entonnent hallel et de plus
petites répondent amen
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Des rues…me sourient avec douceur, moi, qui
suis une sorte de Juif yiddishiant,
Dans le sillage duquel ne parviennent pas à
estomper
Le rythme et la sonorité d`une ancienne mélodie
liturgique 3
As much as the Yiddish poet attempts to assimilate the
rhythm and shape of contemporary Montreal, the city imposes
its own landscape, which in turn becomes imbued with significance. In decoding of the meaning of the Mountain (which
appears in many of Segal’s poems) in Yiddish poetry, Anctil
moves gracefully between individual and collectivity, Montreal
as it was imagined, and Montreal as it was lived.
Accueillant au pied de ses pentes l`’îlot
que constitue le quartier immigrant juif, la
“montagne” devint le point d`encrage du
judaïsme montréalais, un symbole par sa masse
sombre et incompressible de la présence divine,
un rappel à la fois de la Jérusalem terrestre et
de la Jérusalem céleste. Le mont Royal parait
de plus sous cet angle un symbole de la nature
canadienne, sauvage, inaccessible, dominant
imperturbable…(275)
Modernist though Segal is, claims Anctil, his humble
shtetl, the town of Koretz is transposed and absorbed into the
“incandescence” of the North American city (91), his modernism and secularity interwoven with inextricable strands of
tradition and religious symbolism. Anctil concurs, then, with
Shari Cooper Friedman’s assessment of Segal as a poet between
two worlds “Dans cette interstice impossible à combler et qui
toujours faisait surgir une impression d’absence et de manque,
l’œuvre poétique de Segal… n’a fait qu’effleurer par moments
les exigences du temps présent et tendait distraitement l’oreille
au tumulte du nouveau continent.” (324)
Anctil’s success at giving us a convincing rendition
of Segal and his place in an evolving Jewish Montreal lies
partly in his skill in using the voices of Segal’s peers to mirror
Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus 235
him, citing, for instance, the socialist poet Sholem Shtern’s
tribute: “Segal a la force poètique de nous faire croire en des
phenomènes que nous ne percevons plus autour de nous”4 and
A.M. Klein’s praise of Segal as a “latter-day Levite… making a
great song for a little clan.” (322)
The book draws on an extensive range of archival
sources in both Yiddish and English, all carefully referenced
in a comprehensive bibliography and in annexes containing
nearly twenty of Segal’s poems in transliteration. This meticulous work contrasts with less careful editing, especially in the
introductory chapter and in some of the Caiserman sections.
These are chronologically chaotic, moving back and forth in
time as the focus shifts from Segal to Caiserman, and from
either individual to the community. And although the reader
will appreciate that Anctil has made use of the transliterated
Yiddish to convey the sonority of some of the poems, it is hard
to understand why sometimes the Yiddish, and at other times,
the French version of a poem appears in the body of the text.5
In giving us a French language biography of a Yiddish
poet, framed by a careful, complex and nuanced account of
the ways of thinking and feeling of the immigrant community,
Anctil crowns a long career of making Yiddish Montreal intelligible and relevant to the francophone Quebecers. He provides a
counterweight to the idea that Yiddish Montreal was a “third solitude,” highlighting for instance, Caiserman’s embrace of French
Canadian poetry. The cost of emphasizing exchange and mutual
influences, as important as these were, is to gloss over anti-semitism, conflict and communal insularity that were part of everyday
reality of Yiddish Montreal, only lightly touched on in Anctil’s
narrative, though admittedly, far from the focus of the work.
The book is sure to resonate deeply with readers partly
because the fragile memory of Segal, the revered forgotten
poet, is reminiscent of the fate of Yiddish culture itself. For a
time solidly rooted in the American diaspora, but ultimately
doomed, due not only to the disappearance of the European
mother-culture, but also to the very acceptance, in America,
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which made the Yiddish modernist project possible, an acceptance which facilitated the eclipse of Yiddish by the language
of Shakespeare.
This intimate, compelling and scholarly collective portrait
is essential for anyone interested in the inner life of the Jewish
community, and in the immigrant experience in Montreal.
Endnotes
Segal described Caiserman as “my guardian angel (45).
English translation of the French translation: “In my labyrinth of
desires and of sparkling sins, where thousands of signs flicker and shine/ I
will draw out the wellsprings of my depthless joys/,and explode thousands
of bright lights!/You will leave your endless fields/and join me in my kingdom of stones/abandoning the divine calm/ of forests and rivers The poem
appears on (90) of the text.
3
(182). Shari Cooper Friedman looks at the same passage from a
different perspective. For her, the tone of a Eastern European Jew looking
at Catholic Montreal is almost ironic, the footsteps on the stones that beat
the rhythm of Segal`s Hebrew liturgy are small and quiet compared to the
ubiquitous ringing bells. Where she sees is David and Goliath, alienation and
the refusal to submit to it, Anctil sees celebration. See her “Between Two
Worlds, the Work of J.I. Segal” in An Everyday Miracle, Yiddish Culture in
Montreal, ed. Ira Robinson, Pierre Anctil and Marvin Butovsky, Montreal,
Vehicle Press, 1990, 115-158.
1
2
Segal has the poetical power to make us believe in phenomena
which we no longer feel around us to a world we no longer feel ourselves,
(286).
5
At one point a poem appears, commented, for a second time.
4
Eve Lerner
Jack Lipinsky, Imposing Their Will: An Organizational History
of Jewish Toronto, 1933-1948. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2011. 384 pp.
The alphabet soup of Jewish organizational history is often
appreciated without a great deal of concern for the individual